14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been struggling for months to wrap up the antitrust case in Europe, but rumor has it that its plans could go crumbling down.
The New York Times reports that opposition grows in Europe in relation to the antitrust proposal that Google came up with and that the Commission eagerly approved without consulting with the company’s competitors.
Ever since the settlement proposal was announced last year, rival companies and critics have been complaining about how it won’t really have any effect on how Google operates its business and how this affects them.
Lobbying efforts started months ago and are still going as Google’s competitors try to get the European Commission to backtrack on the settlement.
“The current proposal does not put traffic diversion to an end,” said Jean-Yves Art, the top antitrust lawyer for Microsoft in Europe. The software giant’s lawyer added that the company now has new evidence to prove that the settlement proposed by Joaquín Almunia, the chief of the antitrust committee, would not be able to restore competition.
The deal that Google and the European Commission reached involves displaying rivals’ search services in a more prominent manner. That’s not enough to appease rival companies which believe that this would do very little to help them become more competitive in Europe.
Google already handles over 90 percent of all searches in Europe, which would be a concerning number if it weren’t for the fact that it already handles over 88 percent of all global searches.
Microsoft claims that in a study it conducted over three weeks in April, its engineers modified Bing search page to operate like Google would under the terms of the proposed European deal.
The company monitored the way Bing users conduct searches for hotels and restaurants and it found that people would mostly ignore the parts of the modified page that were supposed to be dedicated to competitors. Instead, the clicks went to the same area that Google is to dedicate to its own services.
One detail that seems to be missing from the story is that Bing has nowhere near the same reach as Google does, nor the number of users.
Either way, Google may end up having to come up with a new solution to solve the problem if the European Commission throws out the deal. It might be a while before we get a decision, but Google promises to continue cooperating with the European Union.